Your team knows who to call when a product question gets complicated. A customer researching your company may have no idea where to turn.

For leaders, the work involves connecting the people who know the answers with the places customers look. It also means deciding who is responsible for technical review, approval, updates, and the handoff to someone who can help with an application.

The leadership question is:

Can a customer find and use your team’s knowledge before they speak with you, and is it clear when they need a person to help?

Start by tracing one recurring question across your website, technical documents, and distributor pages. Look for the gaps a customer would encounter without your internal knowledge.

The missed opportunity may happen before a conversation

Sannah opens with a customer who finds a product but cannot tell whether it will work in their design. Someone inside the company could answer the question quickly, yet that explanation is missing when the customer needs it.
This is the question behind the book: how much of the knowledge across your teams can a customer actually find and use?

Customers move between three jobs

Discover, Prove Fit, and De-risk describe work a customer needs to do. A customer may begin with an AI answer, check a company website, compare a distributor page, and look for technical proof. A new question or a request from procurement can send them back to research.

The useful question for your team is whether the available information helps the customer move through those jobs, including knowing when to speak with an engineer or salesperson.

A reliable answer needs shared ownership

Sales, customer service, reps, and distributors hear where customers get stuck. Application engineers help check whether an answer holds up in the customer’s application. Product management brings requirements, capabilities, and limitations. Product marketing helps make the explanation clear, and marketing helps put it where customers look.

Job titles may vary, and one person may cover several roles. The team still needs to agree who prepares the answer, checks it, approves it, and maintains it.

The five foundations give the team a place to start

• Product Truth: Explain what the product does, where it fits, and where it does not.
• Governed Knowledge: Make ownership, review, and updates clear.
• Signal Quality: Consider whether observed activity shows meaningful customer interest. A click or download alone does not establish purchase intent.
• Workflow Readiness: Clarify who owns each step, who reviews the work, and when another person needs to help.
• Human Trust: Make it possible for customers to reach people who understand the application, check assumptions, and explain trade-offs.

Use these foundations to examine one product family and one recurring question. Choose a gap your team can work on together.

Human expertise helps customers decide

Customers can arrive with research and still need help checking what it means for their application. Are they comparing the same product and information? Which assumptions need attention? What else needs to be understood before a recommendation is made?

AI can help organize and prepare information. People remain responsible for the advice, decisions, and commitments that follow. Sannah also explains that no formula guarantees inclusion in an AI answer

• 00:00 The product question a customer could not answer

• 00:44 Why I wrote Visible or Invisible

• 02:04 Start small and look beyond internal knowledge

• 02:45 Researching options before a conversation

• 03:28 Discover, Prove Fit, and De-risk

• 04:00 Consistent answers and technical judgment

• 04:55 Shared ownership and one recurring customer question

• 06:05 Review, approve, maintain, and test the answer

• 07:02 The five foundations of the Visible GTM System

• 08:09 Human Trust and helping customers decide

• 08:49 The companion toolkit, foreword, and book details

• 09:24 Closing thoughts

• • Manufacturing and industrial B2B leaders responsible for connecting technical expertise with customer needs
  • Product management and product marketing teams improving product explanations
  • Sales and customer service teams answering recurring application questions
  • Application engineers reviewing product claims, conditions, and limitations
  • Distributors and manufacturers’ reps working with product information across channels
  • Teams exploring how AI-supported research affects the information customers need

• • Choose a recurring customer question to work on with your team
  • Look for gaps and inconsistencies across the places customers research products
  • Clarify ownership for preparing, checking, approving, and maintaining answers
  • Identify when a customer needs technical help to assess an application
  • Use the five Visible GTM foundations to organize a small improvement before expanding it